Freeze and Dabo negative religious recruit UT

[JacketVol]

Care to provide evidence of that from a source other than the bible? Outside of the bible there is almost no first hand accounts or records of Jesus. Seems kinda odd for someone who supposedly worked so many miracles that all the books in the world combined together couldn't hold them. And I don't say this to anger anyone, I spent the better part of my life in a Christian household, and going to church three plus times a week.[/QUOTE

Other historical resources exist that write about Jesus. So, not odd.

 

[Biopsyman]

After we win the east/SEC this year all will be forgotten.. recruits will be lined up..Nothing would be sweeter than giving Freeze at beatdown in ATL

 

[RikidyBones]

I agree with everything else you said 100% except this part. The frustrating thing about the odds is that there really should be other life forms. We're just having trouble finding it (though we're getting much better at looking).
There's a real thing called the Fermi Paradox that states something along the lines of "if there is other life in the universe the odds are that we would have already found it, or vice versa, by now." I have a hard time with that due to the expanse of the universe. Some now are saying that it could have been possible for another life to have found our planet before complex life had formed and that species could have died before we evolved. Still I would have expected to have found artifacts in that case.

Anyway, I love this stuff and am probably boring the saban out of you. Ultimately, I agree with not treating each other badly.

I go to church, plan to teach my son around Christian values but I do have my questions. Were we put here? By who? Etc. I also have the same belief as hawking in that we need to stop inquiring about life via communication. Itll be the death of this planet. I do find it funny when someone says "we would have found something by now" like a race that can travel through space uses the same technology that our primitive radars can detect.

I know it'll seem like I'm all over the place but I couldn't help but notice you said theory/law is almost fact. I have a hard time believing that a species that figures out the earth was round a few hundred years prior has the ability to have legitimate theories and laws of the universe and it's physics.

For example, if you burn a door down, law of entropy(I believe) says it can never be restored due to energy this and that. I don't believe that. I also don't know where to start with proving that wrong as I'm a financial guy. I also don't think we are close to figuring it out. However, I don't think our current laws should be considered law as it was a well known fact that the sun revolved around us not too long ago. Why we are so arrogant is a mystery but it is curious that we are the only species that has come this far cognitively. We have developed a mixture of structure, purpose and shelter while still maintaining a sense of individualism. Does this prove God? Of course not. There are hundreds of possibilities. But a Creator is one of those. Is that creator just.. an alien or something all knowing? Who knows. People mold that story to their comfort and that's OK.

#toilettyping

 

[Vol'n'beers]

I know it'll seem like I'm all over the place but I couldn't help but notice you said theory/law is almost fact. I have a hard time believing that a species that figures out the earth was round a few hundred years prior has the ability to have legitimate theories and laws of the universe and it's physics.

For example, if you burn a door down, law of entropy(I believe) says it can never be restored due to energy this and that. I don't believe that. I also don't know where to start with proving that wrong as I'm a financial guy. I also don't think we are close to figuring it out. However, I don't think our current laws should be considered law as it was a well known fact that the sun revolved around us not too long ago. Why we are so arrogant is a mystery but it is curious that we are the only species that has come this far cognitively. We have developed a mixture of structure, purpose and shelter while still maintaining a sense of individualism. Does this prove God? Of course not. There are hundreds of possibilities. But a Creator is one of those. Is that creator just.. an alien or something all knowing? Who knows. People mold that story to their comfort and that's OK.

#toilettyping

Lol about the toilettyping. That's when humans do their best work.

I think it's amazing that we've come so far so fast. That's one of the things we should feel proud about as a species. As for the mathematical/physical laws we are always on the lookout for ways to disprove or revise them. We didn't create the laws, we just put a language to them (math). However, every application in which we know of seems to validate them. The biggest exception being the gray area between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We haven't figured out why Einstein's theories don't seem to work on the ultra small scale.

Entropy is not an easy thing to understand, even for engineers who have to use it. The best example I've ever heard was from a British physics professor that said that imagine you have a sand castle in a vacuum and you flip it upside down and then back. There is one chance that the sand particles fall back into the exact form of the sand castle that they started in, but the great probability is that they will fall into a different, less ordered state. So even entropy is not 100%, but it is so probable that it will always increase (again in a closed system) and we say it's law.

We are very arrogant to think that any one of us knows exactly what any of this is about. That's why I love science because there's always something new to discover. That's also why I support religious belief (even as an atheist) because I think that, in it's pure form it provides a comfort and an answer to these other questions which we may never understand. I just don't like the way religion gets used as a tool Freeze/Dabo, politics, etc.

 

[StillStanding]

You can't spell Jesus without UT! ..........Oh wait!

 

[overseasorange2]

.

After looking at Bama's record the last 8 years, I doubt it

 

[Vol'n'beers]

start here for a general well stated summation of the evidence
Is There Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God? How the Recent Discoveries Support a Designed Universe

there are between 10^78 to 10^82 atoms in the known, observable universe. many of the constants exceed this vastly fine tuned range


[/SIZE]

On the notable scientists who indicate their belief in some creative force, I only have a few comments:
1) Stephen Hawking is not a good example. He uses the term God much like Einstein did to have a term for the answers to the questions we keep stumbling on. He is self proclaimed atheist.
2) Fred Hoyle is a very controversial name amongst scientists and, though he did great work.
3) Basically, there are very accomplished scientists that remain religious. If you look at the community as a whole though that ends up being only about 6-7% and decreasing. I wouldn't begrudge a scientist with amazing discoveries his beliefs of origin as long as the work is sound and contributed to our overall understanding. I just choose to leave out the bit about "purposely created."
4) All of the examples are something to the extent of "things are so vast and the numbers are so intricate and amazing that they must have been designed." I have heard this described as a divine fallacy (I think that's a real term too).
- It looks like I have to agree with you on the amount of atoms. It seems too small (though that is a gigantic number). The calculations assume a lot, but we have to assume in our position.

As for all of the constants, that is some very cool work you did. Even retrieving that is a task and I really enjoyed reading it. Again, though, I think reading into it is a mistake. It seems a lot like what I have mentioned before. "If this thing is so amazing that we can't prove idea A wrong yet then idea A must be correct." That line of thinking has proven to be wrong throughout history. I just think that there is so much history of the universe that we don't understand that we don't understand how those ratios/constants evolved to the point that they allow for life. If you take the distance of the Earth from the Sun as a basic example. We are at basically the perfect distance from the Sun for life as we know it. However, we also know that that distance will close as the Sun begins its process of expanding and dying. At some point the distance will be too small and the life on Earth will all die. I wonder if another life form looking at a charred Earth before the Sun explodes would say, "that planet was just too close to its star to sustain life."
If the constants and ratios you list are, in fact, designed for life then why didn't life begin until 9 billion years after the creation of the universe?
The lottery is actually a good example of this. The odds that you as an individual will win the lottery are very small (1 in 292,000,000). Each ball has to land on one number of many. If any of them don't, then you don't win. However, if you allow millions of people to play over several weeks/months then the chances of someone winning are much, much better. If you look at each ball as one of the necessary constants for life and the millions of people playing as the expanse of space then it becomes a lot more imagineable that eventually the lottery would hit and life would begin.

 

[sanddune50]

Creationism? As in the earth is only 7000 years old? C'mon Sandvol, you can do better than that. I don't have a dog in this catfight of religion vs atheism, but when a group (such as that one in Kentucky) pushes their agenda as fact all in the sake of $$$ is just plain immoral. Preying (praying) on the gullible is not a thing of beauty.

Who says the earth is 7,000 years old? I remember reading that an uneducated southern pastor made this claim when evolution was being brought into the school systems years ago. Since when does one person or a handful of people represent a group? It's pretty ignorant to suggest every Christian or person that believes in Creationism interprets the Bible the exact same way. There is a verse that discusses the aspect of time in human eyes as compared to God's eyes. I'm paraphrasing, but the verse suggests that a day in the life of God is the equivalent to a 1,000 years to man. Never a wise move to marginalize or compartmentalize a group of people. That's like me suggesting all black people support Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

 

[BeecherVol]

We left about 90,000 a year in Florida to move to Harlan Ky. We will be making less than 40,000 together at our jobs we have found here. It took me 4 months to find a job that didn't require me to work on weekends. There are way more of us small congregation pastors that live a life of sacrifice and faith, than there are those prosperity charlatans. I love God, without him I would be dead or in jail..."For we are not our own, for we are bought with a price". I dont say a whole lot on here about this, because VN is a place where I can just be a regular guy and argue about silliness. I don't come here to preach, but this thread struck home with me.

"Justified" move. Those people need help.

 

[JDisThereThere]

It's not God's fault that Eve believed the serpent and ate of the one tree that God commanded her and Adam to not eat. God does not know evil...evil and temptations to sin come from Satan. James 1:13-15:

Jas 1:13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man:
Jas 1:14 but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.
Jas 1:15 Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is fullgrown, bringeth forth death.

Thus is exactly what happened to Eve...the serpent tempted her with the thought that if she ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then she would be able to be just like God in discerning good and evil. The serpent planted the seed, and then Eve began to lust after that knowledge that she didn't currently have, so she ate the fruit and then gave some of it to Adam and he sinned. The same thing happens today...Satan gives us temptations to sin (God allows him to do that (1 Corinthians 10:13) because if we don't have the ability to make our own free will choices, then we are robots and have no reason to even be here). Our choice is do we follow God and His commands and resist the temptations, or do we do like Eve and let the lust of the eyes and the pride of life get in the way, leading us to sin? The choice is ours and has always been since God created mankind in His own image (Genesis 1:26-27).

My point is that the Bible claims God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, basically all-everything, and that he intricately designed and created everything. Therefore, he is ultimately responsible for everything.

Does not everything happen according to God's divine plan? Therefore, he knew that Eve would be tempted, he designed her psyche/personality so that she would be tempted. He gave her free will, but did he really if he already pre-designed his plan for the universe and everything happens according to that plan? So many times, especially in the Old Testament, God becomes angered with the actions of humanity and then punishes humanity, rather brutally and unjustly in some cases, for acting exactly how he designed and created them be. He knew that mankind would fall into sin, he made it so that we would.

It's like if an engineer/mechanic designed and built a car, and then got mad at the car when it broke down. And not just mad, but thought the car deserved to punished for breaking down. And not just punished, but tortured forever in the worst place imaginable for breaking down.

Besides, who put the Tree in the garden? Who created Satan? Who allowed Satan to enter the garden? Who allowed Satan to tempt Eve? What was God doing the exact moment when Satan tempted Eve? Why didn't he appear and chop that slimy serpent's head off? Why does Satan even exist? You guys do realize that if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he has known where Satan is and what he was doing, and has had the ability to destroy him every single moment since Satan's creation. Yet he hasn't destroyed him, why? Why would you create a universe and the let some other dude run around screwing up and with your creation. Yet again, why would God have created Satan in the first place?

When I approach this stuff with an open, rational mind, God appears to me to be an evil, wicked, mass-murdering psychopath, and if there was a truly perfect supernatural creator, he would be so much better than the God the Bible describes. It just seems obvious to me personally that God did not create humans, but that humankind created many Gods. Sorry, I know that is going to terribly offend a whole lot of you guys, but that's just how I see it.

 

[overseasorange2]

You can't spell Jesus without UT! ..........Oh wait!

Think this thread is turning into a religious debate, so :gone::gone::gone::gone:

 

[JacketVol]

In actuality, if you fully believe God's word, there's not other books that have been around longer. The Bible started being "written" on the 1st day of creation. God chose to wait until Moses came to start actually recording all the events leading up to his lifetime, and then used numerous other writers over hundreds and hundreds of years (with the inspiration from the Holy Spirit) to record His laws and events He felt that needed to be included in it. I think there are over 40 different writers spanning that long of a time period, yet the Bible is in complete harmony. Prophecies prophesied hundreds of years before the event actually happened...over 300 prophecies in the Old Testament about the Christ, and Jesus fulfilled every single one of them in the New Testament. The probability of that occurring is an astronomically staggering number, that we can't even comprehend and seems virtually impossible. Yet, with God, all things are possible.

I hope and pray that you find your faith again one day, fellow VFL.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was void and without form.
I think this is what some called the gap theory. Not that it matters, but I feel God did create something here prior and when Saban........I mean Satan rebelled he was cast down from heaven to this earth. I think it was then that what had been created before was cursed. Then he started over again. Who knows how much actual time between the gap. It would explain a lot about the age of the earth and things of such.

All in all, the explanations do not really matter. You either believe in God or not. Hard for me to think things just happened with no creator. Man has messed up and will continue to mess up the things of God. That is religion which is something that Jesus railed against mightily in his time on earth. It is about a personal relationship and belief. That is what God wanted when he created things in the first place. I can choose to believe and someone else can choose not to do so. In the end, we will know.

 

[JDisThereThere]

You were doing so well until the very end of your post.

-The universe WAS created to be perfect. God pronounced everything "good" after its completion.

-The sin of God's "image-bearers" tainted all of creation (not that everything became evil but that evil permeated everything).

-Again, you were doing so well until the last part. Yes, God gave Adam & Eve a choice. What good is it to be given free-will if you have no choices? The first humans were given everything and they could do anything, but one thing and that's where they failed, resulting in sin and death. But, of course, God knew this before time and creation. However, He knew that He would also send His Son to die as a substitute for us. Again, a choice is involved once again as to whether we decide to trust in His sacrificial death on our behalf. When Jesus returns again, He will restore creation to perfection (the first 2 chapters and the last 2 chapters of Scripture describe this scenario).

Now I will sign off before Freak slaps my hand for getting all "religious-like" on a football forum...

See my post above as it addresses the same question...
Although I will add that I think vicarious redemption by human sacrifice (aka the very basis of Christianity, that Jesus died to save us from our sins) is actually quite disgusting and immoral. I mean human sacrifice is generally looked at with tremendous disdain in the day and age. It's barbaric.

 

[Vol'n'beers]

In regards to my last post about mathematical and physical constants and ratios being too perfect to be random I just thought of a story/allegory/? (I'm an engineer not an English major) I heard once that seems to fit what I'm trying to communicate. It goes something like this.

On a road in front of a house a pothole forms. Over time the pothole widens and expands. One night it rains. The next morning the puddle left by the rain looks around and says, "Wow! Look at this place. I am so lucky to be here. How amazing that this pothole was made just for me!"
I know it seems silly, but we are that puddle. In any other pothole we would be of a much different shape and size. Also, if you were to freeze that puddle and try to drop it into a different pothole it would not fit.

 

[QuickSmurf]

Lol about the toilettyping. That's when humans do their best work.

I think it's amazing that we've come so far so fast. That's one of the things we should feel proud about as a species. As for the mathematical/physical laws we are always on the lookout for ways to disprove or revise them. We didn't create the laws, we just put a language to them (math). However, every application in which we know of seems to validate them. The biggest exception being the gray area between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We haven't figured out why Einstein's theories don't seem to work on the ultra small scale.

Entropy is not an easy thing to understand, even for engineers who have to use it. The best example I've ever heard was from a British physics professor that said that imagine you have a sand castle in a vacuum and you flip it upside down and then back. There is one chance that the sand particles fall back into the exact form of the sand castle that they started in, but the great probability is that they will fall into a different, less ordered state. So even entropy is not 100%, but it is so probable that it will always increase (again in a closed system) and we say it's law.

We are very arrogant to think that any one of us knows exactly what any of this is about. That's why I love science because there's always something new to discover. That's also why I support religious belief (even as an atheist) because I think that, in it's pure form it provides a comfort and an answer to these other questions which we may never understand. I just don't like the way religion gets used as a tool Freeze/Dabo, politics, etc.

A lot of us thought as you do.
From Atheism to Christianity: a Personal Journey - bethinking.org
There are many intellegint people who took the time to honestly, carefully, thoughtfully investigate the evidence. That is the intelligent thing to do. To believe is not to let go of all reason and logic. It is not an ignorant thing to do. I would add that it not an easy thing to do either. It's not easy to examine this subject and risk everything that you're comfortable with. It could even be frightening for someone. I have the utmost respect for a person who honestly examines all the evidence no matter the conclusion that they come to. Most won't take the time nor give the effort. I hope one day in all seriousness that you take the time.

 

[JDisThereThere]

A lot of us thought as you do.
From Atheism to Christianity: a Personal Journey - bethinking.org
There are many intellegint people who took the time to honestly, carefully, thoughtfully investigate the evidence. That is the intelligent thing to do. To believe is not to let go of all reason and logic. It is not an ignorant thing to do. I would add that it not an easy thing to do either. It's not easy to examine this subject and risk everything that you're comfortable with. It could even be frightening for someone. I have the utmost respect for a person who honestly examines all the evidence no matter the conclusion that they come to. Most won't take the time nor give the effort. I hope one day in all seriousness that you take the time.

The thing for me is there is no evidence other than the Bible, and the main thing that made me an atheist was reading the Bible with an open mind.

 

[BondJamesBond]

The thing for me is there is no evidence other than the Bible, and the main thing that made me an atheist was reading the Bible with an open mind.

The main thing that convinces me that there is a creator is viewing science with an open mind. Evidence is everywhere and an open mind will see it. The fact that you are unable to see it yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

 

[StoVol]

In regards to my last post about mathematical and physical constants and ratios being too perfect to be random I just thought of a story/allegory/? (I'm an engineer not an English major) I heard once that seems to fit what I'm trying to communicate. It goes something like this.

On a road in front of a house a pothole forms. Over time the pothole widens and expands. One night it rains. The next morning the puddle left by the rain looks around and says, "Wow! Look at this place. I am so lucky to be here. How amazing that this pothole was made just for me!"
I know it seems silly, but we are that puddle. In any other pothole we would be of a much different shape and size. Also, if you were to freeze that puddle and try to drop it into a different pothole it would not fit.

Any configuration of dirt supports water whereas very, very few configurations of physics can support life.

Mistaken Objections that Seek to Trivialize Fine-Tuning




Is fine-tuning a fallacy? | Uncommon Descent
The Cheap-Binoculars Fallacy: “Don’t waste money buying expensive binoculars. Simply stand closer to the object you wish to view”. We can make any point (or outcome) in possibility space seem more likely by zooming-in on its neighbourhood. Having identified the life-permitting region of parameter space, we can make it look big by deftly choosing the limits of the plot. We could also distort parameter space using, for example, logarithmic axes. A good example of this fallacy is quantifying the fine-tuning of a parameter relative to its value in our universe, rather than the totality of possibility space. If a dart lands 3 mm from the centre of a dartboard, is it obviously fallacious to say that because the dart could have landed twice as far away and still scored a bullseye, therefore the throw is only fine-tuned to a factor of two and there is “plenty of room” inside the bullseye. The correct comparison is between the area (or more precisely, solid angle) of the bullseye to the area in which the dart could land. Similarly, comparing the life-permitting range to the value of the parameter in our universe necessarily produces a bias toward underestimating fine-tuning, since we know that our universe is in the life-permitting range.

 

[OGbabyaviVol]

The thing for me is there is no evidence other than the Bible, and the main thing that made me an atheist was reading the Bible with an open mind.

IMHO, it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe that there is a supreme being, who created everything that we see and know. How everything works so intricately together, from life in the universe to how the earth is so precisely positioned in relation to the sun to the complexity of the human body...I just can't see any other way than a supreme being, God, who did it. There's way too much going on that it can all just happen by chance. It would be one of those obsurd, astronomical numbers that there is no way to wrap your head around the meaning of the number.

 

[OptimusPrimerib]

start here for a general well stated summation of the evidence
Is There Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God? How the Recent Discoveries Support a Designed
[/SIZE]

I have read a lot of Paul Davies. He is really good at explaining many tough concepts for the average person like me. One of the things he said related to this is to consider: Does the Mississippi River flow exactly the way it does because that's where the ports were? Or is it the reverse.

I've heard the irreducible complexity argument before and there are rebuttals out there. Just as an example the finding a pocket watch on the beach story. A pocket watch is much too complex to have formed itself the way the rest of a beach may shape itself over time, thus it had to have been made by something/body. One counterargument I've read is that pocket watches always have some technique or manufacturing process or signature that can be used to trace the watch back to its exact maker. Do we have that somewhere in nature? Just throwing in my two cents.

 

[StoVol]

the tracing technique points to the incredibly precise fine tuning as the evidence

behe's irreducible complexity is augmented in my mind by the motor components in cells which mankind invented afterwards without cell knowledge, stators, rotors, pumps.. all kinds of things man came up with but now see first invented in nature

meyers origin of information considering entropy and thermodynamics, this is the hardest thing of all to explain because it would explain the origin of life.. all information systems degrade over time and there is no evidence of any information ever created without a programmer

dembski on the subject of specified complexity has some good info as well

there is a difference between Shannon information and specified complexity, making complexity even more improbable

the more we look, the greater the improbabilities become, not just 1 in a trillion type odds, but colossal odds so large that the 14.7 billion years since the big bang would not come anywhere close to having enough space to search all the possibilities

 

[JDisThereThere]

The main thing that convinces me that there is a creator is viewing science with an open mind. Evidence is everywhere and an open mind will see it. The fact that you are unable to see it yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Evidence such as...

If your saying the universe is evidence of a perfect benevolent creator, I just don't see it that way. The universe is evidence of the universe. Life is proof of life. The universe may have a creator, but I just don't see how that creator could be perfect or care about us.

I mean for starters you have to consider that 99.6% of the universe is just empty space where virtually all life dies instantly. That doesn't seem like a perfect design to me. Don't get me wrong, the universe is awesome. The Earth has many wonderful things going for it. Yet there are just as many if not more things that aren't so wonderful and are constantly trying to kill us. I just don't think that the universe was designed for us based on what I've learned about it.

 

[StoVol]

Evidence such as...

If your saying the universe is evidence of a perfect benevolent creator, I just don't see it that way. The universe is evidence of the universe. Life is proof of life. The universe may have a creator, but I just don't see how that creator could be perfect or care about us.

I mean for starters you have to consider that 99.6% of the universe is just empty space where virtually all life dies instantly. That doesn't seem like a perfect design to me. Don't get me wrong, the universe is awesome. The Earth has many wonderful things going for it. Yet there are just as many if not more things that aren't so wonderful and are constantly trying to kill us. I just don't think that the universe was designed for us based on what I've learned about it.

that would be presupposing a designer or even chance's intent.. that a designer intended 100% of the universe to be life sustaining.. it could be anywhere from 0 to 100

 

[KoachKletus]

If you have faith, then you believe those prophecies were made 100s and 100s of years before Christ was even born. Actually the 1st prophecy about the Christ was made in Genesis 3:15, shortly after God created the universe and everything in it.

Take evolution...if it's true, then why don't we have any recordings of how things have evolved over millions of years that have stood the test of time? At least some recordings that date back a few 1000 years? Why is it that the father of this theory, Darwin, wasn't born until 1809? That's only 200 years. It's the same as it always has been and always will be...man is so desperate to prove his wisdom that he will continue to make up theories, such as evolution, to try to prove himself smarter than God. However, God and His infinite wisdom will continue to stand the test of time. Take a moment and read 1 Corinthians 1:18-31.

Sure is odd that 2% of your genome comes from our Neanderthal ancestors. Your good book simply cannot account nor refute this fact. The theory of evolution has more truth, evidence as close to empirical as one can get. The only counterpoint any religion offers up is "because we have faith". As science becomes all the more evidentiary, as people become more self aware, religion will become an afterthought. Two cents.

 

[CroKev]

They did appear to write about Jesus but they both were born after Jesus died, which means their accounts were at best second hand.

Per you argument, then, a lot of historical people didn't exist and a lot of historical events never occurred. Our earliest recorded Classical Greek writer, Homer, never existed. The great world leader Cyrus of Persia never existed. If you discount writers who were born after the death of their subject material, it's hard to conclude that most of civilizations' poets, philosophers, and even emperors actually "existed."

I'm not jumping on you my friend. I do this for a living (my PhD is in this area and most atheists - people like Bart Ehrmann - would never ever for a moment even SUGGEST that Jesus was not a historical person).

Jesus' resurrection is the key to evangelical Christianity. Yes, it's true - only the NT ( particularly the book of Acts) mentions that more than 500 people witnessed the resurrected Jesus. Here's the key: most of these people were still around when Luke wrote Acts so people could grill them if they wished. What made so many people accept their testimony is that it was so consistent throughout their numbers. Furthermore, these people refused to deny the event of the resurrection DESPITE THE INTENSE SUFFERING THEY FACED. It's one thing to blindly follow someone you've never met simply because you BELIEVE. But these eyewitnesses to Jesus' resurrection could not just rely on faith - they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands the risen Christ. Though many of them cowered as the Romans searched for them after Jesus' crucifixion, something quite extraordinary must have happened for them to undergo such a dramatic change in short order so much so that they put themselves at great personal risk in proclaiming publicly that they had seen the risen Lord. :hi: